Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Television evenings
for me these days are the Stanley Cup games. But between the first and second
periods when Don and Ron begin their inarticulate chatter on Coach's Corner my
concentration slips and my mind drifts. I get to thinking about things like: who
invented that black rubber hockey puck anyway?

I’m glad I asked. There
is no officially recognized answer.

The first recorded mention of a hockey game was made by British explorer Sir
John Franklin. Sir John, who before losing his way and perishing in the Arctic, wrote that his
crew members exercised by playing hockey on the ice at Fort Franklin, Northwest
Territories in 1825. He did not mention what they were using for a puck. Likely it was a ball, or piece of ice or a frozen musk-ox turd.

Vulcanized rubber
was invented in 1839 but rubber didn’t enter hockey until the 1880s. Cow
patties, stones, balls, lumps of coal, frozen potatoes and pieces of wood all
were used in the meantime.

Balls proved too
difficult to keep in the playing area. Wood was much better. Game
enthusiasts began shaping the wood into squares, then rounds easily produced by cutting tree limbs.

The Victoria Hockey
Club of Montreal began using rubber pucks in the late 1880s. The first rubber
pucks likely were made by cutting a rubber ball in half, then trimming the
halves.

Today the standard
puck is an inch thick, three inches in diameter and weighs six ounces. They are
frozen before play, which helps reduce bounce, making for better control.

Other non-essential
information you might want to have for the remaining days of Stanley Cup
madness:

-The word hockey comes from the French
word hoquet, which means shepherd’s hook.

-Hockey did not evolve from the North American
Indian game of lacrosse. It evolved from the British stick and ball
games of shinty, hurley or bandy.

- No one knows for sure where the word puck came from. Probably it is derived from old Scottish and Irish puc and poc, meaning to poke or push. Makes sense. There's much pushing and poking in the game these days.

Monday, June 2, 2014

Ontario, Canada’s most populous and once most important
province, chooses a new government on June 12. It does not matter what party is
elected to lead that government. Nothing will change because Ontario is a
textbook example of the dysfunction and decline in the world’s democratic
governments.

Dysfunction and
decline in failing governments are examined a new book published just as the
Ontario politicians spilled onto the campaign trails with their wagonloads of unachievable
promises. The new book is titled The Fourth
Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, written by John
Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of The
Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, management editor at the same news
outlet.

The book makes the
case that we must change and re-master the art of governing because our
governments have become too large, inefficient, and are going broke.

In the first half
of the last century people lived each day with almost no connection to
government. Today, governments influence almost everything we do and are with
us most hours of every day. The cost of government in our lives has become
unsustainable.

In 1913, U.S.
government spending was 7.5 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By 2013
it had ballooned to 41.6 per cent of GDP. Canada’s government spending as a
percentage of GDP is 41.9.

The Europeans are the
champs in this category. The European Union contains seven per cent of the
world’s population, producing twenty-five per cent of the world’s GDP. Yet it
accounts for fifty per cent of the world’s social spending, which has
bankrupted some of its member countries.

Fixing our broken
system of government is the greatest political challenge of the next decade, The Fourth Revolution argues.

But don’t watch for
any Canadian government to lead the reform of a governing system headed at high
speed toward a cliff. Canadians are second only to the Europeans as hypocrites
when it comes to reforming government. We bleat like sheep about ever-increasing
taxes and fees, but squawk like famished vultures for government to do
something when anything goes amiss in our lives.

Politicians and
parties, who have allowed pandering for votes to become more important than
doing what is right, have corrupted the political system. The political health
of the party and its politicians takes precedence over what is best for the
people. Making the tough choices needed for responsible, efficient government has become abhorrent.

Voters are not
blameless. Most of us are poorly informed on the important issues. We form our
opinions on hearsay and spin, researching little on our own. Traditional news
media, on which we once relied for facts, is collapsing and new media still has to
grow up to become useful and reliable.